Player-to-Player Interaction, Victory Screen

The players can now sever each other's routes. Also, if one severs the other's source route that connects his two central nodes, the victory screen now pops up with the players' statistics. There are a few more tasks to complete concerning player interaction before I move on to the next step, which I think will be fog of war. But you never know.

clevceo

Vista, Busy

Vista is up and running just fine. The only trouble I had was connecting to the VPN at work, which I finally figured out was a problem with the firewall. I tested the game and it ran flawlessly.

Finals week is coming up, so time is precious. I've been pretty busy lately outside school as well, so I haven't made any progress in over a week.

Hopefully I can soon get back to work. I'll first allow interaction between players, and then I'll get started on the fog of war. That's the plan for the next few weeks. Comment.

clevceo

Vista

I haven't had time to work on anything lately. Hopefully I'll find some moments here and there. I just installed Vista Business (in 15 minutes!) and I'm currently reinstalling all the software I need. I haven't yet tested xna on Vista, but I assume that when they say it's totally vista compatible that they mean it, especially since they're both microsoft and both brand new. Thus, I'm not worried.

Many of my friends think Vista is satan-spawn, but they haven't yet given me any plausible reasons why. So far, I like it. I haven't hit any ruts yet and it looks great. But only time will tell.

clevceo

"Multiple Player Support"

Phew! I just finished the "multiple player support". It took some real thinking and some real doing to get it up and running. I also had to redo the controls, which are now much more flexible.

I also began a method to display custom text on the screen. I drew each character manually, but it wasn't so bad because they were all block letters, so I used GIMP, created a 20x20 brush and snapped to the grid, which was also spaced 20x20.

After I complete the text display code, I'll probably implement a pause menu, then go right into the fog of war, which will probably take a little time to figure out.

Things are going well so far. Please comment.

clevceo

Screenshot, Multiple-Player-Support, Multi-Player

First screenshot. If you'll notice, the left half of the route system is being retracted. The big white spots are destroyed nodes and the little ones are people. Normally when you retract, you salvage most of the people, but in this case, there was a traffic jam, so few survived.

The Y's are switches, which split the route in two. The +'s are the central nodes, which slowly generate people. The little dark ones are the sub nodes, which are basically cheap waypoints. And the lightning bolt is an accelerator node, which boosts the speed of the people passing through it. It's great for building a long road real fast, for scouting.


I've begun implementing the "multiple player support" as I've coined it. Not multiplayer, but multiple players, as in a human and some ai players.

During my little "vacation", ideas came and went. I've been thinking about how I'll implement the fog of war and I have a pretty concrete idea. Also, I'm going to allow the user to map the controls how he/she sees fit.

Since multiplayer isn't an option at the moment, I might implement a split-screen option where multiple players can play on the same computer (with multiple gamepads or something).

I've been thinking about the graphics and how they'll look in the end. I want something unique and interesting.

Anyway, that's about it for now. Comment please.


clevceo

New Graphics

I felt it was time to have something more than the mere placeholders on the screen, so today I created some nifty .pngs with Inkscape. They're simple, but attractive. However, I'm unsure about the central node's pic. It just doesn't fit.

Anyway, the game is a little more presentable, which is good because I'm going on a trip to see family tomorrow, and I'll probably end up showing it to a few.

clevceo

Main Menu

The Main Menu is up. However, there is currently only one option: Play. However, it's set up in such a way that I can easily add more options, so it's still a big step forward. And one option or not, it feels great seeing the game come closer to completion. It was also refreshing to be able to work on something other than the gameplay for once.

clevceo